Elevating Perspective and Collaboration.

We learned with the Harvest Dinner that large-scale, site-specific, community focused events are great for community development. If done right, they can focus on developing new collaborations, reinterpreting a place, and expanding the potentials a community. Whereas the Harvest Dinner forged new relationships among chefs and aspiring culinary professionals, exposed small-farmers to new markets, brought together a diverse array of the community at a single table, and allowed people to experience an industrial site in need of city-action and attention, Elevate set out to expand momentum across the disciplines that shape a culture. We added architects and designers to the mix.

Conceived as a one-of-a-kind experience at the intersection of both Stored Potential banner topics–Land Use, Food, Agriculture and Transportation. The event took place on a bridge over the Interstate 80 corridor that clipped and decommissioned the elevator, made two neighborhoods from one, and produced a massive flow of people and goods through the city—changing our movement, economy, and physical landscape. Much like the towering concrete grain elevator, the landscape comprising the I-80 corridor has become white noise. An aggregation of concrete yards, rail corridors, unused lots, and in between spaces, this corridor comprises a large percentage of Omaha’s landscape. What if we occupy it from a different perspective?

The result was an unprecedented collaboration between teams of food and spatial designers in a unexpected public space. Teams designed and constructed 19 unique ‘Elevation Stations’ lining the bridge and served a corresponding small dinner course of the freshest ingredients grown and produced locally. Stations included a dinner table comprised of smaller dinner tables etched with names and addresses of all homes removed for the construction of I-80, burlap bags of lettuce greens biked to the site by caregivers of the plants then hung from an overhead map indicating the location where they were biked in from, and a dilapidated barn reconfigured into a pavilion heat charred to reflect the char-grilled locally raised lamb to be served from it. All 500 attendees were assigned a unique sequence of stations with the intent that each would spark conversation and experience. Select stations were designed to move beyond the event into derelict public spaces across the city.